5 Reasons Why DevOps Is Hitting Its Stride

Reflecting on the DevOps State of the Union event that my company, JumpCloud, held in conjunction with four other leading companies for press and analysts, it was hard not to think that DevOps is really starting to hit its stride. Don’t get me wrong, not everybody is practicing it, nor adopting it... yet. However, this is precisely the key factor that I've been thinking about -- the momentum is certainly here, and it's palpable.

Let's step back quickly to talk about what DevOps is and why it is such a profound new movement [apologies in advance to those who read my column regularly and already have this foundation]. Fundamentally, DevOps is a methodology that enables a company to better meet its customer's needs. DevOps is an organization wide capability that starts within IT and extends to sales, marketing and other areas of the organization, to rapidly iterate on a product or service, integrate an entire company to focus on working together, automating critical activities to gain speed and most important of all to be more customer focused. In short, DevOps is making companies agile, fast and customer-centric. DevOps emerged as an extension of Agile, to leverage and deal with cloud scale, and to create an integrated, more impactful IT organization.

DevOps has really only been in the IT lexicon for a few years, but over the past six to 12 months it has gained tremendous steam. Here are five reasons why:

Unicorns are leading the way – Gene Kim, one of the fathers of DevOps, likes to refer to the great Web companies such as Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook among others as unicorns. These are the breakout successes that could only be possible with a new operating philosophy. Although very few of us will be in companies with that size and scale, they paved the way. They too were once startups, small companies, mid-size companies and even large enterprises, before they emerged as unicorns. Their success in many ways is a roadmap for how DevOps can succeed at all different sizes of organizations.

Thirst for knowledge – when an educational media site emerges to focus exclusively on a particular sector or industry, and it is backed by an all-star cast of the “who's who” in the community, you know that the trend is lasting. Case in point: DevOps.com just announced its launch as the pre-eminent site for all things DevOps. With industry leaders at the helm, this should be a high quality resource for organizations everywhere. There is just not enough content being produced about DevOps' methodology, processes, tools and real-world experiences. Organizations are hungry for employees skilled in DevOps. There is a genuine thirst for knowledge. Sites like DevOps.com and others will be moving quickly to fill that gap in the market.

Small companies, big successes – on the other end of the spectrum are the small companies that are succeeding at massive scale with big results. Companies like Tumblr and WhatsApp are excellent examples of small companies delivering services to millions of users with a relatively small team. And, moreover, they were acquired for significant amounts of money. Their success hinged on a tremendous focus on building an amazing service that delighted millions of users. Traditional IT processes and product development methodologies weren't going to help these small companies punch above their weight.

Security pros are embracing it – when the folks that are often saying 'no' to protect an organization are suddenly deeply interested in DevOps, that is another sign that the movement is gaining attention. At the recent RSA Conference, a leading security conference, security pros were openly discussing how they can leverage the DevOps revolution as a way to embed security into the IT lifecycle. Security pros have long faced an uphill battle to bring security into the fold of the IT development process. DevOps in the words of one analyst represents “security’s last, best hope.”

Strategic benefits – last on this list, but perhaps the most critical is that DevOps is strategic to a business. Rackspace, at our recent DevOps event, commented that prior to adopting DevOps it took them two years to release a new product. Now with DevOps, in the last 18 months they have released 18 new products. That's a dramatic change and a massively strategic one. As a company, they are operating at a pace to be more competitive. Organizations that are adopting DevOps are making a choice to operate closer to their customers and at a faster pace. Now that's a strategic benefit.

DevOps will no doubt have its detractors and will have its fair share of failures. It won't work in every industry and at every company. But what’s clear is that there is a place for DevOps at many organizations across all industries. With a significant trend like this, IT pros around the globe will be studying up on it to see if it will work for them and their organization.

The noise that sounds like a freight train roaring towards us is DevOps and it's coming fast.